Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself...in 21 Days) at Dominant Systems Book Store

A great book for beginning programmers who want to learn Perl. Filled with concrete examples and, yes, by using this book you will be able to write good Perl code on your own in 21 days. But no perlson is an island, and there is no single book that covers Perl completely, so we recommend that you also get Programming Perl, which is better at providing the language specifications, and, in fact, was written by the author of Perl. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Customer Reviews & Comments
...when buying books. If the book says "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 days", any advanced topics that it covers is gravy. Obviously it's a beginners book. Some of the complaints I've read are just silly. "Don't buy the book because Lemay got a math formula wrong" (if you know what the right formula is, great. She's not supposed to teach you algebra too!), "don't buy the book because when you're done learning everything that the book has to offer (which is substantial) it won't turn into a super advanced book" (go buy one of those 2000 page tomes that tries to please everyone and only succeeds in breaking your back). No book can please everyone. However, if the book clearly lets you know that it's a beginners book, and you insist on complaining that that is what it is,... duh? I orginally bought this book because I had a need to write a script to connect to a db. I found out that perl could talk to dbs, so I decided that this would be a cool way to learn perl. So I tried to find a perl book that talked about connection to dbs. Unfortunately, the few books out there that talked about this assumed you were an expert in perl and had no time to teach it to you. So I realized that I needed a good, quick foundation in perl. I dusted of my perl for dummies book. Now this is a true beginners book. Way too lightweight! This book will not prepare you for perl code that you'd see in the "real world". The important part is, THIS BOOK WILL! The greatest thing that an author can do for you is give you a spoon so that you can feed yourself. This book does that. By the way, this book has a lot of topics that I haven't seen in "advanced" books. Don't think that it's a lightweight. The author does cover enough material so you can educate yourself afterwards. I probably have about 40+ technical books, and this is one of the better ones. As someone who makes a living developing web apps, I need to be able to learn new stuff QUICKLY and get projects done. This author helped me greatly in this regard.

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